Miss Teen USA brings anti-bullying message

Bullies are no respecters of age, gender or appearance, the 2012 winner of the Miss Teen USA pageant told local high school girls on Tuesday.

John Penney

Bullies are no respecters of age, gender or appearance, the 2012 winner of the Miss Teen USA pageant told local high school girls on Tuesday.

“Bullying comes in all different shapes and sizes,” Logan West, 18, told a group of Norwich Technical High School sophomores. “And it’s about being different.”

West, raised in Southington and now studying commercial dance at Pace University in New York, used role playing and personal anecdotes to impress the importance of stopping the cycle of bullying during two student forums for ninth and 10th graders.

“My first experience with bullying was when I was in seventh grade and was told I wasn’t ‘acting my skin color,’” said West, whose mother is black. “At first, I ignored it. But this person kept pushing.”

The bullying escalated, West said, with verbal jabs turning into physical encounters.

“She spit in my face and cut my hair at a sleep-over,” West said. “My bully and her friends jabbed me with umbrellas while I was waiting at the bus stop in the rain.”

Eventually both West and the bully were suspended. She said the lesson she took away from the experiences was to speak up.

“You can’t get help if no one knows you need it,” West said. I waited too long.”

In-between conversations, Norwich Tech students were encouraged to participate in several activities, including using their bodies to spell the word respect and insulting, ripping and re-assembling a paper doll.

“She talks about bullying and look at her now,” she said. “I was bullied in eighth grade and I didn’t say anything. It stopped when I left the school. If I had a chance to do it again, I would have said something.”

“There was a lot of verbal bullying,” she said. “And it would almost always escalate. It doesn’t seem to happen here so much.”

Gilda Pucio, the school’s equity coordinator, said the number of students willing to report bullying has increased in the last few years.

“It used to be students were worried about being called a rat,” she said. “I remember talking years ago to the father of a student — a classic bully who stole lunches — about the problem. His reaction was ‘Boys will be boys.’”

West said the scars of bullying can persist long after physical wounds have healed.

“It took (the bully) six months to knock me down, to make me shy and withdrawn,” West said. “But (stopping bullying) is not out of our hands. Learn and pass it on.”